Excerpts from The Farfarers, by Farley Mowat (also published as The Alban Quest):

Up to fourteen feet long, superbly muscled, clad in a hide as tough as armour, adult walrus fear nothing in the ocean.
Gregarious, and amiable except when roused in defence of kith and
kin, they once lived in vast and far-flung tribes in all the northern
oceans.

They have been known by many names.
Eskimos called them aivalik; Russians called them morse; Scandinavians knew them as hvalross; Englishspeakers have called them
sea-cows and
sea-horses.

By whatever name, walrus have been a major source of wealth for human beings from dim antiquity.

One day in the museum of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in
Leningrad, a Siberian archaeologist handed me an intricately carved
piece of yellowed bone.
What did I think it was?

“Ivory?”
I hazarded.
“Elephant, or maybe mammoth?”

“Ivory,
da.
The hilt of a sword from an excavation in Astrakhan on the old trade route to Persia.
But it is neither elephant nor mammoth.
It is morse.
You must know that for a very long time
morse tusks were the main source of ivory in northern Asia and Europe.
Sometimes they were worth more than their weight in gold.”

He went on to tell me of a Muscovite prince captured by Tartars
whose ransom was set at 114 pounds of gold—or an equal weight in walrus
tusks.
This was no isolated example.
From very ancient times until as late as the seventeenth century,
walrus ivory was one of civilization’s most sought-after and highly
valued luxuries.
Compact and portable, the teeth in their natural “ingot” state
served as currency or were carved into precious objects—some purely
ornamental; some quasi-functional, as sword and dagger pommels; and some
religious, including phallic symbols in fertility cults.

“The tooth of the
morse,” the archaeologist continued, “was white gold from time out of mind.
There was nothing: no precious metals, gems, spices, no
valuta more sought after. How odd that such hideous monsters should have been the source of such wealth.”

Wealth derived from walrus was not limited to ivory.
The inch-thick leather made from the hides of old bulls would stop
musket balls and offered as much resistance to cutting and thrusting
weapons as did bronze.
For tens of centuries it was the first choice of shield makers and their warrior customers.

The hide had other uses as well.
Split into two or even three layers, it made a superb sheathing for ships’ hulls.
A narrow strap, cut spirally from a single hide, could yield a continuous thong as much as two hundred feet in length.
When rolled into the “round,” such a thong became rope as flexible
and durable as that made from the best vegetable fibres, and it was a
good deal stronger.
In fact, walrus-hide rope remained the preferred cordage and
rigging on some north European and Asian vessels until as late as the
sixteenth century.

Although walrus are today restricted almost exclusively to Arctic
waters, they were formerly found in Europe south to the Bay of Biscay
and, in the western Atlantic, as far to the south as Cape Cod.
However, as people became more numerous and more rapacious, and as
walrus ivory steadily increased in value, the more southerly herds were
exterminated, one by one...

Getting the feel of the job, Poole’s crew [in 1603] killed about four
hundred walrus and sailed home with eleven tuns of oil and several casks
of tusks.
When they returned to Bear Island the following year, they were professionals...

Within eight years of Poole’s first visit to Bear Island, thirty
to forty thousand walrus had been butchered, and so few remained as to
be not worth hunting.

An even worse slaughter took place in New World waters, especially
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where every year more than 100,000 sea
cows hauled out on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands alone...

Up to 25,000 walrus were killed each year on the beaches of the Magdalen Islands during the 1700s.

Early on Sunday morning September 19, 1999, Jacqui - then 20 years old - and four friends were on their way home from a birthday party. Reggie Stephey, an 18-year-old high school student, was on his way home from drinking beer with some buddies. On a dark road on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, Reggie's SUV veered into the Oldsmobile carrying Jacqui and the others. Two passengers in the car were killed at the scene and two were rescued.

Within minutes, the car caught fire. Jacqui was pinned in the front seat on the passenger side. She was burned over 60% of her body; no one thought she could survive. But Jacqui lived. Her hands were so badly burned that all of her fingers had to be amputated. She lost her hair, her ears, her nose, her left eyelid and much of her vision. She has had more than 50 operations* since the crash.

* Update - now more than 120 operations.

DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE.

Reposted - yet again - because the message is still relevant. Do not drink and drive. Ever.

"Thierry Lepercq, head of research, technology and innovation at the French energy company Engie SA, said in an interview at Bloomberg that he sees a potential for the cost of solar electricity to fall below $10-megawatt hour (1¢/kWh) in the sunniest climates by 2025. Lepercq believes “solar, battery storage, electrical and hydrogen vehicles, and connected devices are in a ‘J’ curve (of upward growth potential).” One consequence of this new energy economy is that, “the price (of oil) could drop to $10 if markets anticipate a significant fall in demand.”
“The promise of quasi-infinite and free energy is here.”..

Other forms of energy are requesting economic support (coal & nuclear) while we transition away from them toward cheaper sources...

The department made the changes on Dec. 21, striking out whole
sentences attributing global warming to human activities and rising
levels of carbon dioxide.

It’s the most recent example of the DNR removing information related
to climate change. More broadly, the changes reflect how the
administration of Republican Gov. Scott Walker has de-emphasized the
subject since he took office in 2011.

In the latest changes, the DNR says of climate change, “as it has
done throughout the centuries, the earth is going through a change. The
reasons for this change at this particular time in the earth’s long
history are being debated and researched by academic entities outside
the Department of Natural Resources.”

Don't blame the staff at the Department of Natural Resources. This change in language was mandated by Governor Scott Walker.

From a transcription of Warren Buffet's comments at a meeting with University of Maryland MBA students in 2013:

(5) How has your understanding of markets contributed towards your political views?

WB: I wouldn’t say knowledge of markets has. My political views were
formed by this process. Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are
born. A genie comes and says to you in the womb, “You look like an
extraordinarily responsible, intelligent, potential human being. Going
to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to
assign to you – determination of the political, economic and social
system into which you are going to emerge. You set the rules, any
political system, democracy, parliamentary, anything you wish, can set
the economic structure, communistic, capitalistic, set anything in
motion and I guarantee you that when you emerge this world will exist
for you, your children and grandchildren.

What’s the catch? One catch –
just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7
billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you
get – you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or
disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc.
You have no idea which slip you will get.

Not knowing which slip you are
going to get, how would you design the world? Do you want men to push
around females? It’s a 50/50 chance you get female. If you think about
the political world, you want a system that gets what people want. You
want more and more output because you’ll have more wealth to share
around. The US is a great system, turns out $50,000 GDP per capita, 6
times the amount when I was born in just one lifetime. But not knowing
what slip you get, you want a system that once it produces output, you
don’t want anyone to be left behind. You want to incentivize the top
performers, don’t want equality in results, but do want something that
those who get the bad tickets still have a decent life. You also don’t
want fear in people’s minds – fear of lack of money in old age, fear of
cost of health care.

I call this the “Ovarian Lottery”. My sisters
didn’t get the same ticket. Expectations for them were that they would
marry well, or if they work, would work as a nurse, teacher, etc. If you
are designing the world knowing 50/50 male or female, you don’t want
this type of world for women – you could get female. Design your world
this way; this should be your philosophy. I look at Forbes 400, look at
their figures and see how it’s gone up in the last 30 years. Americans
at the bottom are also improving, and that is great, but we don’t want
that degree of inequality. Only governments can correct that.

Right way
to look at it is the standpoint of how you would view the world if you
didn’t know who you would be. If you’re not willing to gamble with your
slip out of 100 random slips, you are lucky! The top 1% of 7 billion
people. Everyone is wired differently. You can’t say you do everything
yourself. We all have teachers, and people before us who led us to where
we are. We can’t let people fall too far behind. You all definitely got
good slips.

"Making a rope from lime bast, the way it's been done for thousands of years in Norway.

Rope
maker Ingunn Undrum and boat building apprentice Dennis Bayer head out
to harvest the bark of lime trees (linden tree), in the spring when the
sap is rising.

The paper thin layers of bast...
need to soak for a long time in the sea to separate. The water in the
Hardanger fjord is cold even during summer, so the bark is soaking until
fall, for 3-4 months.

Rope maker Sarah Sjøgreen lays the bast rope,
and makes a traditional carrying rope with three strands, for
transporting the cut grass during hay making season. The bast is
naturally water proof, and rots very slowly compared to other rope
materials. This explains why it has been found intact in viking
excavations dating back to the 800s."

"Canada’s “victory nickel,” struck from 1943 to 1945, included a
special message to stimulate the war effort: Engraved around the rim
were the words WE WIN WHEN WE WORK WILLINGLY in Morse Code. The coin was reissued in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of V-E Day."

"When Danish naval officer Gustav Holm was exploring the eastern coast
of Greenland in 1885, an Inuit named Kunit gave him this
three-dimensional wooden map.

The two parts form one whole: The bottom carving represents the coast
from Sermiligak to Kangerdlugsuatsiak, and the top is an island
offshore. The Inuit would carry these maps in their kayaks to navigate
the waters between the two landmasses."

Found in the Futility Closet. Not sure where the Inuit got wood; it must have been a precious resource in the subarctic.

It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump.
But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation,
apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or
exacerbated by [neoliberalism]...

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of
human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic
choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards
merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market”
delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning...

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among
the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social
democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual
development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a
collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism...

The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute...

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate.
“The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us
equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with
power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations
and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite
different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful
activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them
for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for
different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to
confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation...

Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy...

A 33-year-old asymptomatic woman (gravida 6, para 5) presented at 22
weeks of gestation with a large herniation of the amniotic sac through
the left uterine wall that was detected by routine ultrasonography. She
had had five previous cesarean sections through a transverse incision of
the lower uterine segment and no previous vaginal deliveries... At 30 weeks of gestation, a healthy male newborn weighing 1385 g was delivered by cesarean section.

The five previous C-sections had resulted in a weakened uterine wall, through which the fetus' legs extended. Impressive image.

62-year-old Chandelon's death, resembling a suicide with a shot fired
to his head, occurred on Dec. 16 and the body was found in his car the
same day although the incident was largely kept away from the media...

Despite Chandelon being left-handed, a gun was found in his right hand,
and the gun was not one of Chandelon's three registered guns. These
details raised suspicions about an assassination rather than a suicide."

Washington, D.C., August 19, 2013 –
Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime
Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today
posting recently
declassified CIA documents on the United States' role in the
controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq's
ouster has long been
public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to
be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan
and execute the
coup.

The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran,
dating from the mid-1970s. The agency
released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response
to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the
code name for
the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release.
Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit
Roosevelt,
the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They
provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's
actions before
and after the operation...

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides,
including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue
whether Iran or
foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's
historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to
respect Iran's sovereignty,
or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference
before better relations can occur...

While the National Security Archive applauds the CIA's decision to make
these materials available, today's posting shows clearly that these
materials could
have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage
to the national security...

But all 21 of the CIA items posted today (in addition to 14 previously
unpublished British documents — see Sidebar), reinforce the conclusion
that the
United States, and the CIA in particular, devoted extensive
resources and high-level policy attention toward bringing about
Mosaddeq's overthrow, and
smoothing over the aftermath.

The aftermath included the return to power of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ("The Shah of Iran"), and the establishment of the SAVAK (secret police), whose torture methods included "electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring
boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the
extraction of teeth and nails."

One can't emphasize enough that Mosaddeq had been democratically-elected by the people of Iran. The U.S. and Britain had him overthrown in order to gain access to Iran's oil resources.

Does anyone still wonder why many Iranians distrust and/or dislike the U.S.?

None of this gives Vladimir Putin a pass. We don’t see enough
reporting on the repression of religion and the media inside Putin’s
Russia. But failing to acknowledge our own dark side when it comes to
internal and external covert operations to twist political outcomes
makes us look hypocritical in a world where so many nations have been
victimized by our covert machinations, often with deadly consequences.

Evidently,
this is the real-world meaning of “American exceptionalism,” where only
we are exempt from the requirement to respect other nations’
sovereignty. There’s no better example of this than the 2014 Edward
Snowden revelations that the U.S. had spied on many other countries,
even allies like Germany, France, Italy and Japan...

For decades both Democrats and Republicans working for Washington law
firms and global crisis management outfits like Hill & Knowlton or
Black Manafort & Stone have helped the world’s most brutal and
oppressive regimes hang on to power and marginalize their opponents, all
while continuing to get U.S. military aid...

The U.S. has manipulated the internal domestic politics of other
countries with escapades in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, the
Caribbean and even in Europe...

We rarely get a glimpse behind that black curtain unless an Edward
Snowden or a Daniel Ellsberg puts everything on the line to pull it back
for us. None of that excuses the Russian attempt to meddle in an
American election, but we should not feign innocence Trying to shape
world events and our own politics through fake news, disinformation,
deceit and deception are as American as apple pie.

24 December 2016

Beautiful. Posted in memory of my mother and the multiple generations of my Norwegian family who attended (and loved) St. Olaf. Filmed in Trondheim in conjunction with the Nidaros Cathedral Girls Choir.

For full appreciation, click the fullscreen icon in the lower right corner of the video

I found this [in 2008] at a European website reporting on the "alternative Christmas message" broadcast by Channel 4 that year. I've edited it for length, and trimmed some of the phraseology to disguise the speaker.

See if you can guess who wrote this and delivered it on television Christmas evening (videos available on YouTube). The more perspicacious among you may recognize the source or remember the event. My posting of this message may offend some TYWKIWDBI readers, but I hope it will prompt some deeper reflection in others - especially at this time of year.

"[God] created every human being with the ability to reach the heights of perfection. He called on man to make every effort to live a good life in this world and to work to achieve his everlasting life…

Jesus, the Son of Mary, is the standard-bearer of justice, of love for our fellow human beings, of the fight against tyranny, discrimination and injustice…

"Now as human society faces a myriad of problems and a succession of complex crises, the root causes can be found in humanity's rejection of that message, in particular the indifference of some governments and powers towards the teachings… of Jesus Christ.

"The crises in society, the family, morality, politics, security and the economy which have made life hard for humanity and continue to put great pressure on all nations have come about because… some leaders are estranged from God…

"If Christ were on earth today, undoubtedly He would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose… terrorists… the world over…

"Today, the general will of nations is calling for fundamental change… demands for a return to human values are fast becoming the foremost demands of the nations of the world.

"The response to these demands must be real and true. The prerequisite to this change is a change in goals, intentions and directions…

"We believe Jesus Christ will return… and will lead the world to love, brotherhood and justice.

"The responsibility of all followers of Christ… is to prepare the way for the fulfilment of this divine promise and the arrival of that joyful, shining and wonderful age…

"Once again, I congratulate one and all on the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. I pray for the New Year to be a year of happiness, prosperity, peace and brotherhood for humanity. I wish you every success and happiness."

Christiane Amanpour had some harsh words for journalists regarding "fair and balanced" reporting in her speech to the Committee to Protect Journalists: "...It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to
differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially,
truth. We cannot continue the old paradigm – let’s say like over global
warming, where 99.9% of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal
play with the tiny minority of deniers. I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in
Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false
moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the
most unspeakable crimes and consequences. I believe in being truthful, not neutral."

"It’s almost impossible to find one of Britain’s secret, underground military bases unless you know what to look for. In the years since they
were built, starting in 1940, many of them have collapsed or fallen
into disrepair. While the bunkers are no longer camouflaged today, they
still guard their secrets. To the untrained eye, their entrances might
look like random holes in the ground.

This is the season for the epidemic of porch piracy as people steal packages from front doors. Some residents are fighting back.

A Minnesota high-school ice hockey goalie made 98 saves in one game (a new national record). "Controlling the puck in the Storm end for 4- and 5-minute stretches at a
time, the Dragons unloaded 45 shots on Bruns in the first period, 41 in
the second and slowed to a mere 24 in the third."

Kangaroos can disembowel other animals with their kick, or place them in a choke hold and drown them.

Bitumen from Syria has been found inside an Anglo-Saxon gravesite at Sutton Hoo. "Given the geopolitics in Britain at the time, it was easier for an East
Anglian noble to get bitumen from Syria than from the west of England."

"The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid
fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense
budget..."

"Guzzlers" are artificial waterholes distributed throughout the American West. They are important to the survival of a variety of wildlife.

"Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone [solar, wind, and hydro] for four consecutive days..." And in a related story, coal is never going to recover as a thriving industry: "Coal does not have a regulation problem, as the industry claims.
Instead, it has a growing market problem, as other technologies are
increasingly able to produce electricity at lower cost. And that trend
is unlikely to end."

Hundreds of fake retail and product apps have popped up in Apple’s App Store in recent weeks. "Entering credit card information opens a customer to potential financial
fraud. Some fake apps contain malware that can steal personal
information or even lock the phone until the user pays a ransom."

"In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India
made an alarming discovery. Some 16,000 feet above sea level, at the
bottom of a small valley, was a frozen lake absolutely full of skeletons. That summer, the ice melting revealed even more skeletal
remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake’s
edges. Something horrible had happened here."

"A new ransomware variant has been discovered using an innovative
system to increase infections: the software turns victims into attackers
by offering a pyramid scheme-style discount. Any user who finds themselves infected with the Popcorn Time malware... is offered the ability to unlock their files for a cash payment, usually one bitcoin ($772.67/£613.20). But they also have a second option, described by the developers as
“the nasty way”: passing on a link to the malware. “If two or more
people install this file and pay, we will decrypt your files for free”.

"For decades, people have puzzled over Racetrack Playa, where hundreds of
rocks weighing as much as 700 pounds roam across the surface of the dry
lake bed, leaving meandering tracks hundreds of yards long." Now the process has been captured on video.

"Americans built more than one hundred thousand kit houses, sold mostly
by Sears, in the first half of last century. These were shipped out on
boxcars, complete, with between ten thousand and thirty thousand pieces,
braces to brads. Midcentury, Popular Mechanics sold several varieties
of home designs—the Modern House, the Family House, the Plywood House.
There's no telling how many of those were built. Totman's precut house
was sold as a concept listing the materials at three prices: $1,800,
$2,800, or $3,800."

WWII shipwrecks in the Pacific are being illegally harvested for their metal content. "...a Dutch expedition preparing a 75th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of the Java Sea found only holes on the seafloor where the ships used to be... While Great Britain and the Netherlands are not to blame for the destruction of the ships in the Java Sea, both countries have repeatedly failed to protect war graves.
The Netherlands has a significant illegal salvage industry, notably looting HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue, and HMS Cressy off the Dutch coast. Similarly, UK salvers have exploited historic Dutch shipwrecks.

The extremely sad tale of Mary the elephant, who was executed by hanging (don't read this if you love animals).

Photos from "Blood and beehives: Phyllis Posnick's styling for Vogue." Re the first image: "‘The model’s eyes were closed for two hours while Penn photographed
every possible variation... He had a picture that wasn’t especially
exciting or memorable, but there was nothing that he hadn’t already
tried... Our model opened her eyes, and I saw that they were completely
bloodshot. Penn said, “Don’t move.” He did just two or three more
exposures."

Watched this a few nights ago. The Hundred-Foot Journey is a very pleasant and enjoyable movie. A predictable plot keeps it from reaching 4+ on my arbitrary scale, but good acting sprinkled with smatterings of food porn and an absence of the killing and explosions so common in Hollywood movies makes it a refreshing change from the usual fare.

Scare quotes (also known, even more colorfully, as “shudder quotes” and
“sneer quotes”) are identical to standard quotation marks, but do
precisely the opposite of what quotation marks are supposed to do: They
signal irony, and uncertainty. They suggest words that don’t quite mean
what they claim to...

That signaling is relatively new, though, and in its own way ironic.
Quotation marks, for much of their history, represented precisely the
opposite of all that chaos: They suggested, even promised, rationality
and objectivity...

Quotation marks vary, in their appearances, across languages. German has
„“, and » «, and ‹ › to indicate quotation; it also, along with French,
Spanish, Italian, Vietnamese, and many more languages, uses the « », or guillemets
(named after the 16th-century French printer Guillaume Le Bé). Those
marks, like their English counterparts, all evolved from a single
origin: the ancient Greek mark known as the diple (“double”). It
looked like this: >. And it was added to the margins of texts not to
suggest quotation, but rather to signal significance—a kind of
proto-underlining...

Scare quotes can also, on the other hand—invoking the “sneer” more than
the “scare”—suggest partisanship on the part of the scare-quoter. To put
terms like “identity politics” or “rape culture” or, yes, “alt-right”
in scare quotes is not just to highlight those terms as matters of open
debate, and thus to place them within the sphere of legitimate controversy; it is also to make, in that placement, a political declaration.

More on this rather confusing topic at The Atlantic. Embedded image via Bits and Bobs, with a hat tip to reader Perduedanslecouloir.

22 December 2016

Every year when this anniversary rolls around, I'm amazed I'm still doing this. The blog began as a way to save time (!) by posting interesting things so I wouldn't have to email them to friends and family. It quickly morphed into an every-day chore (note the "weekday reading" and "weekend reading" lists in the right sidebar, which I no longer find the time to browse with regularity). Now I view the blog as a preparation for eventual senility - a repository for things that will entertain and interest me that I can read/forget/reread/forget again ad infinitum at some date hopefully still well into the future.

TYWKIWDBI will finish this year with over 14,000 posts which have generated about 48,000 comments from a couple thousand followers and a much larger number of occasional visitors who have generated about 21,000,000 pageviews.

And now what? Back on my sixth blogiversary I cited Jason Kottke's observation that traditional blogs are a dying breed.

Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and
they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come.
But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all
agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly
being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are
blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning
things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating
Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997,
wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king.
Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or
Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings
with kids...

I have not seen any recent data on the "state of the blogosphere." Technorati used to publish an annual report on the numbers of blogs and relevant trends, but even that analysis seems to have faded away. I don't intend to switch to a different platform. Last year I expressed my own attitude this way:

I still struggle with motivation to keep blogging because of the
seemingly unending distractions of real life. But I do get a great deal
of satisfaction from the depth and breadth of knowledge, the
sophistication, and the almost always unfailing courtesy of readers who
comment on the posts. I learn things, I teach things, and every now and
then I get help with my car or my computer for free. Such a deal.

There are days when creating a series of quality blog posts is extremely satisfying...

...and other days when it seems to be an annoying chore (especially when the material involves politics or current events)...

To avoid the latter, I've already begun morphing the focus of the blog, pulling away from current events and starting to go a bit "retro," harvesting some of the many many thousands of links I've saved up over the past nine years (no sense saving them if they're not going to get used). So I believe long-time readers here will start noticing some alteration in content, with more focus on older material (which also saves me surfing time). I do fully intend to push on to reach that tenth blogiversary next December. After that it will be time to seriously reassess my priorities.

21 December 2016

Fold up the string of letters below so it fits in the grid. Squares
of the same colour (except white) must not contain contiguous letters in
the string.

H E R U I H I E I N B U L L L D S F N D E I I S B

Who is the indicated person (of particular interest to members of the Royal Statistical Society)?

(4 points for the completed grid: 1 point for identifying the indicated person)

This question is one of thirteen components of the Royal Statistical Society Christmas Quiz for 2016. Some of them appear to be fiendishly difficult. This one is solvable with simple logic. I'll place a clue to the answer in the Comments for this post.

(Please don't post answers to any of the other quiz questions in the comments; I'm still working on them. Tx.)

"In 2002, Jason Padgett was the victim of a vicious beating outside a
karaoke bar in Tacoma, Washington. Upon regaining consciousness,
Padgett’s sight was forever altered by a condition called acquired
savant syndrome. The brain trauma opened his eyes to an entirely new
world..."

Last month I posted a link to information on book sizes ranging from "folio" to "sixty-fourmo." Not included in that list are the formats that are bigger than your average sheep. Last week the BBC reported that the "world's most expensive book" was to be sold by Sotheby's - referring to a complete edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America. It contains life-sized illustrations of the birds, and thus is a huge book.

The BBC article showed only a print, but I located a photo of another copy at the website of the Cincinnati Public Library (embedded above). It apparently is a "double elephant" folio format [the "elephant folio" is up to 23" tall, the "Atlas folio" up to 25" tall, and the double elephant is 50" tall.]

Reposted from 2010 to add this photo "from archives of Prague castle" (photo credit M. Peterka) found at Book Porn:

Yes, I have seen the comments that it may be a normal book and a very tiny librarian...

Jobless
people generally cannot earn additional income while collecting
unemployment benefits or they risk losing that assistance. For laid-off
workers from Nokia, simply collecting a guaranteed unemployment check
often presents a better financial proposition than taking a leap with a
start-up in Finland, where a shaky technology industry is trying to find
its footing again.

Now,
the Finnish government is exploring how to change that calculus,
initiating an experiment in a form of social welfare: universal basic
income. Early next year, the government plans to randomly select roughly
2,000 unemployed people — from white-collar coders to blue-collar
construction workers. It will give them benefits automatically, absent
bureaucratic hassle and minus penalties for amassing extra income...

The answers — to be determined over a two-year trial — could shape
social welfare policy far beyond Nordic terrain. In communities around
the world, officials are exploring basic income as a way to lessen the
vulnerabilities of working people exposed to the vagaries of global
trade and automation. While basic income is still an emerging idea, one
far from being deployed on a large scale, the growing experimentation
underscores the deep need to find effective means to alleviate the
perils of globalization...

Universal basic income is a catchall phrase that describes a range of
proposals, but they generally share one feature: All people in society
get a regular check from the government — regardless of their income or
whether they work. These funds are supposed to guarantee food and
shelter, enabling people to pursue their own betterment while
contributing to society...

A Silicon Valley start-up incubator, Y Combinator, is preparing a pilot
project in Oakland, Calif., in which 100 families will receive
unconditional cash grants ranging from $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Voters
in Switzerland recently rejected a basic-income scheme, but the French
Senate approved a trial. Experiments are being readied in Canada and the
Netherlands. The Indian government has been studying basic income as a
means of alleviating poverty...

Strikingly, basic income is being championed across the ideological spectrum...

“Some people think basic income will solve every problem under the sun,
and some people think it’s from the hand of Satan and will destroy our
work ethic,” says Olli Kangas, who oversees research at Kela, a Finnish
government agency that administers many social welfare programs. “I’m
hoping we can create some knowledge on this issue.”

From an interesting long read at The New York Times. I scanned the article for the use of the word "inflation" and didn't see that aspect discussed.

Here played by the composer and original instrumentalist. After the release of The Third Man in 1950, this song was #1 in the United States for three months, until it was displaced by Nat King Cole singing "Mona Lisa." It certainly must be the best-known piece of zither music ever created.

In April 1946, in the bleak aftermath of the second world war, American
and British intelligence services arrested seven men and three women in
Berlin on charges of manufacture, possession, and sale of fake
penicillin. A former German army private was the alleged chief of the
fake drug ring that included ‘Two former GIs in love with frauleins and
an American doctor with a passion for fine cameras…who got at least
$13 000 [about $170 000 (£130 000; €160 000) today] in cash from one
Berlin druggist for penicillin."..

Penicillin was scarce but much sought after as an innovative
cure of bacterial infections, and it became a currency in post-war
Europe. The Times reported from Berlin “There is great illicit
demand for penicillin here for the treatment of venereal diseases.
Supplies are strictly controlled by the British and American
authorities, being reserved for the treatment of their soldiers, and
secondarily for the treatment of German women likely to spread disease.
Otherwise supplies are not available.”

There
is also evidence of illegal penicillin trade in post-war Vienna. Zane
Grey Todd was head of criminal investigation in the American sector. His
obituary tells us that “His most dangerous case involved two American
medical officers who were stealing and selling penicillin on the black
market, aided by a former Miss Austria, with whom they were living.”
That Todd may have been a key source for Greene is suggested by a
tributary clue in the film—Martins gives a cultural talk on the American
author Zane Grey.

We assembled data on elected and runner-up candidates for national
elections occurring in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland,
Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, using online
sources including Wikipedia and national lists of leaders..

The sample included 540 candidates: 279 winners and 261 runners-up who
never served. A total of 380 candidates were deceased by 9 September
2015. Candidates who served as a head of government lived 4.4 (95%
confidence interval 2.1 to 6.6) fewer years after their last election
than did candidates who never served (17.8 v 13.4 years after
last election; adjusted difference 2.7 (0.6 to 4.8) years). In Cox
proportional hazards analysis, which considered all candidates (alive or
deceased), the mortality hazard for elected candidates relative to
runners-up was 1.23 (1.00 to 1.52).

That's the term that has been suggested regarding proposed legislation in South Carolina:

People buying computers in South Carolina would be limited in their access to porn online under newly proposed legislation.

A
bill pre-filed this month by state Rep. Bill Chumley would require
sellers to install digital blocking capabilities on computers and other
devices that access the internet to prevent the viewing of obscene content...

Both sellers and buyers could get around the limitation, for a fee. The
bill would fine manufacturers that sell a device without the blocking
system, but they could opt out by paying $20 per device sold. Buyers
could also verify their age and pay $20 to remove the filter...

16 December 2016

This "magic square" was incorporated by Dürer in his engraving "Melencolia I" (full image below)

In recreational mathematics, a magic square is a n × n square grid - where n is the number of rows (or columns) - filled with distinct positive integers in the range of [1.. n2] such that the sum of the integers in each row, column or diagonal equals a same value...

The order-4 magic square Albrecht Dürer immortalized in his 1514 engraving Melencolia I, referred to above, is believed to be the first seen in European art. It is very similar to Yang Hui's square, which was created in China about 250 years before Dürer's time. The sum 34 can be found in the rows, columns, diagonals, each of the quadrants, the center four squares, and the corner squares (of the 4×4 as well as the four contained 3×3 grids). This sum can also be found in the four outer numbers clockwise from the corners (3+8+14+9) and likewise the four counter-clockwise (the locations of four queens in the two solutions of the 4 queens puzzle), the two sets of four symmetrical numbers (2+8+9+15 and 3+5+12+14), the sum of the middle two entries of the two outer columns and rows (5+9+8+12 and 3+2+15+14), and in four kite or cross shaped quartets (3+5+11+15, 2+10+8+14, 3+9+7+15, and 2+6+12+14). The two numbers in the middle of the bottom row give the date of the engraving: 1514. The numbers 1 and 4 at either side of the date correspond respectively to the letters "A" and "D," which are the initials of the artist.

I'm a bit puzzled. If the once-a-day tablet represents 417 times the recommended dose, does that mean the manufacturer assumes that everyone taking it is deficient in intrinsic factor? Does the "daily value" only apply to intravenous administration? If that's the case, shouldn't the 2500 micrograms then become the recommended "daily value" for oral intake?

I suppose I could look this up, but I thought it would be faster to ask here, because some reader will know the answer. Thanks in advance.

The person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "Person from Porlock", "Man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.

Posted because I encountered the term while reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in which "the title character
saves the world, in part by time-travelling from the present day to
distract Coleridge from properly remembering his dream; if Coleridge had
completed the poem an alien ghost would have 'encoded' certain
information within the completed work that would have allowed him to
make repairs to his spaceship in the past at the cost of wiping out all
life on Earth."

The words accompanying this Alex Jones-sponsored video are taken from a speech given back in October by filmmaker Michael Moore, who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. Long viewed as a spokesperson for liberal progressive views ("Moore's written and cinematic works criticize topics such as globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, President-elect Donald Trump, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism...), Moore was roundly panned for his public predictions that Trump would win the election.

Here are some excerpts from the text accompanying this brief (four and a half minute) video:

MICHAEL MOORE: I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to
vote for Trump and they don't necessarily like him that much, and they
don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or rednecks,
they're actually pretty decent people, and so after talking to a number
of them I wanted to write this:

'Donald Trump came to the Detroit
Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and
said, "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit
and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars
when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them."

It was an
amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever
said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the
ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin --
the "Brexit" states.

You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking
about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because
he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every
beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of
what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov
cocktail that they've been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they
can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them...

So on November 8, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be
handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or
touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man
who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined
their lives: Donald J. Trump.

They see that the elite who ruined
their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates
Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after
they loved him and created him, and now hate.

Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I'm voting for on November 8.

The fulltext is at the YouTube link. For liberal Democrats, these are painful words to read or to hear in the video. Moore does qualify his comments with "whether Trump means it or not," to acknowledge the possibility probability that the entire campaign is a con job, but as an explanation for why the election swung the way it did, this is as good a brief summary as I've found. If you are a progressive who has put their head in the sand since November, it's time to put on your big boy pants and listed to this short diatribe.

I've closed comments for this post. Please don't append them to other posts.

A new scourge is attacking the milkweed plants that are essential to the survival of Monarchs:

But the menaced monarchs have another problem, the destructive oleander aphid (Aphis nerii). This bright, yellow insect, introduced from the Mediterranean area along with the oleander plant, has found milkweed to be an attractive food source. They form large colonies on milkweed stems and leaves that aspirate sap from the plants’ nutrient-transporting phloem, stunting or killing their host before it can provide sustenance for migrating monarchs and their larvae.
This photo shows an aggressive colony of oleander aphids feeding on a first-year common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) near the coast of Massachusetts. For cultivators of monarch milkweed gardens, non-toxic insecticidal soaps are effective against the oleander aphid. However, the threatened monarch will likely need more help in order to survive.

14 December 2016

1. Begin (5 points)What might, in turn, be represented by a Buckeye, a Boxer, a
Berkshire, a Brown, a Brahman, a Bengal, a Beveren, a Bearded, a Boa, a
Brumby, a Boreray and (in 2016) a Barbary?

5. Out of Place (4 points)(a) Explain why, compared with ‘sweet milk’, ‘little cut off’,
‘recooked’, ‘beautiful country’ and ‘tired’, ‘slice’ is out of place.(b) Similarly, which one of ‘iron’, ‘little blackbird’, ‘black
pine’, ‘musky’, ‘tears of Christ’ and ‘white savage’ is out of place?

9. In the sky, on the lea (8 points)What might have inspired whom to write the following, and where has a line been omitted?“Nature, in tooth and claw,
In lands of palm, of blossom
That sparkled on the field
And on a simple village,
And drowned in yonder living
By hooded doctors.”

10. Diagram (6 points)Explain the diagram, and give appropriate row and column labels.
Solutions (and more questions) at the link.

I'm eagerly awaiting the 2016 King William's College General Knowledge Paper for 2016-17. It should be published in The Guardian this coming week. (Here's last year's quiz.) (And the answers.)

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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